Small business software is an investment in your business. You want to maximize the return on your investment by selecting the most beneficial software for your small business. Communication and collaboration are two huge aspects of any small business, and there is plenty of software to facilitate it within your team. Here are 6 things to look for in your small business software;
1. Increased Communication
This may be an obvious one, but your collaboration software should facilitate communications. Collaboration is not just uploading a file to a shared drive. If you’re collaborating on files and documents, make sure you and your teammates can communicate around those files and offer feedback to the creator. You’ll want a chat feature for instant communication with teammates. This type of connection is incredibly valuable in any business setting.
2. Improved Idea Generation
Your small business software should facilitate idea generation and open doors for effective brainstorming. By using new tools to brainstorm, team members are automatically thinking in a new way which can spark better ideas and improvements for the future. Choose a collaboration software system that uses unique social tools like mentions to bring people together, and that can help generate more ideas and better plans for your clients and customers.
3. Increased Transparency
You should find a robust collaboration solution that the transparency in your business communication increases. You can still hold private conversations, but try to have just as many public discussions in your collaboration system about new ideas for the business, new clients or customers and ideas for the annual holiday party. This type of open communication will allow others to feel a part of the significant decisions in the business and increase their pride in working toward improving the company as a whole.
4. Increased Product Quality
When business teams work together, the outcome is much improved. Three heads are better than two, and two heads are better than one, so when collaborating with your team members, trust that you will come up with the best idea and work hard on creating the best end product possible. You’ll also see an increase in pride around the office because they all pitched in to work on and produce a quality product for your business.
5. Stronger Teammate Connections
As you add contributors, whether in the office or remote, it becomes harder to maintain comradery. To keep a team functioning well, you want them to feel connected, to the business and each other. Your small business software should facilitate these connections, so your team feels connected regardless of their location. Find a solution that allows you to see what others are working on and to read their bios and profiles, and will enable others to share aspects of their personal lives. All this helps build team connections and camaraderie.
6. Improved Planning Processes
With the ability to communicate with many team members at once, you should be able to use your small business software to plan future items together. Work together on a meeting agenda, prepare for a presentation or discuss options for an event. Utilizing features like chat and discussions can efficiently facilitate the need to plan in real time, and can potentially reduce the number of planning meetings you hold.
